Care-based community communication, capacity, and agency during the COVID-19 pandemic: Evidence from the Complexo da Maré Favela, Brazil

Scholars and officials have argued that the strengthening of communities and community-led development constitute an important policy goal in the fight against emergencies such as the COVID-19 pandemic. Nevertheless, most strategies to address such crises fail to consider the significance of community-driven solutions, community-level knowledge, and actors. At the same time, researchers have recognized that communication, such as through local newspapers, promotes community development by increasing communities’ social capital and cohesion. But the role of community communication in the encouragement and exercise of other levels of agency and in the development of community capacity, including to address emergencies, remains underexplored. This article investigates whether and how community journalists in a Rio de Janeiro favela have expressed and sought to develop favela residents’ individual and collective agency during the COVID-19 pandemic. We do so by analyzing thematically the COVID-19 virus-related articles that appeared in a community-based newspaper, Maré Online, between March and September 2020. We also conducted semi-structured interviews with Maré Online reporters to augment our analysis and supplemented that data with participant observation of relevant virtual community-led organizing meetings and events. Our study shows how community-based journalists revealed and promoted individual and collective agency through what we term a “care-based, participatory solutions journalism,” which supported favela residents’ “communicative freedom” as conceptualized by Benhabib (2013). This analysis stresses the connection between communicative freedom and community capacity. It illustrates the importance of community-produced communication in development of and in community, especially when those populations are pejoratively framed in the media, public policy, and often also, research.